From Voluntarism to Specialization

In 2005, sport and exercise medicine (SEM) was granted the status of a fully fledged medical specialty and was made available on the National Health Service (NHS) for injured recreational athletes. It was part of wider government strategies concerning national well-being and was an attempt to defuse a ticking public health time bomb posed by growing national levels of physical inactivity and obesity. The origins of this announcement can be traced back to the formation of the British Association of Sport and Medicine (BASM) in 1952. ¹